you're an angry blade, and you're brave (but you're all alone)

You’re barely 5-years-old when they leave you. Your mother is crying but your father is stoney faced as ever as you eavesdrop from the side of the make-shift overnight camp. “We don’t have the food or the supplies,” he says, “We can’t afford to play this game anymore.” You’re not sure what game he’s talking about. He never plays any games with you.

“He’s not ours. We can only provide for our blood, not some bastard left to us like a punishment. He’s not like us. He never will be.”

It takes you a long time to understand, and even then you’re not quite sure that you do. The fact that your family doesn’t look or move or speak like you do has never really troubled your 5-year-old mind. Your brothers and sisters don’t seem to mind, either – but then again, none of them are forced to wear a thick hood that makes it hard to see when they walk into town, and none of them are shuffled away when guests visit the camp. Funny how things like that don’t strike you as odd until you think about them in slow motion.You wring your hands together and slip away from Mother and Father’s tent.“He’s one of them, anyway. We’ve done more than anyone else would. He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine.”When you wake up the next morning, you are alone.–For the first days (weeks? Months?) you think you’re going to die. You don’t move from the shell of the camp for a very long time and at night, after you’ve cried yourself dry, every noise the forest makes becomes the footsteps of your mother coming to collect you again. She never does.Eventually, when you run out of the water and food left for you, you move with all the aim and determination of a leaf caught in a storm. You’re very hungry and very tired and your clothes are ripped and dirty from the spots where the thorns have caught them. The first patch of berries you find aren’t poisonous, at least, not enough to kill you, but they make you throw up. The second patch turns out to be safe and the rabbit you find has only been dead for a day or so, the flies have just barely started to gather around it’s eyes. The water you find is full of dirt but you’re too thirsty to care.

You survive, but only barely.

It’s amazing what parts of the brain kick in when the fear of death becomes the paramount concern.It never gets any easier but eventually you learn which berries hurt your stomach, to ignore the taste of raw meat and bones and gristle, to sleep in hollows to protect yourself from rain, and perhaps most importantly to steal without being seen.

It never gets any easier but eventually you forget the way things used to be and the sounds in the trees at night no longer make you wake up to wait for your mother. You forget your mothers face entirely.You forget a lot of things.

–

It’s dark when they come for you. You’ve just turned 9-years-old (though you don’t know that) and you’ve long since trained yourself to sleep lightly but not lightly enough, it would seem. The rope loops around your neck before you can stir and the next thing you know your flailing wildly and gnashing your teeth. Humans are dangerous, you’ve learned. Sometimes they try to chase you down after you steal from their camps, but they’re slow and clumsy and you know these woods better than they do, almost always. But these humans are different. These humans aren’t angry with you, you can tell that right away by the way they hold their heads and the way they speak to one another. No, they’re not angry, they’re happy. They’re very happy indeed to have caught you.You throw yourself against the rope, tearing at it with your nails until your skin is red and bleeding. The rope is attached to a pole that is held onto by three men and try as you might, you can’t reach back far enough to get to them. You struggle until your limbs ache and then you struggle even more.

Eventually one comes near enough to you, trying to wrap another role around your arms, and you’re able to bite him. Electricity sparks between your teeth and the man yelps and stumbles away, bleeding. You feel a surge of pride and renewed determination for all of a second before you realize that he’s laughing.

“Definitely one’a’them wolfy bastards, haha! A reg’ler snow white! Little fucker packs a punch, I tell you!” Then he holds up his arm and displays the bite mark and all at once your drive is swept out from under you. The other men join in his laughing and jeering and you sink low to the ground and growl.

You don’t see the man who throws the thick black bag over your head, and then you don’t see anything at all. Distantly, you remember a hood you once were forced to wear and a family that wasn’t yours, once upon a time.The men tie your hands and feet together with ropes that feel like chains.

–

They don’t so much ‘train’ you to fight as they force you to survive. There’s a roof over your head and they give you more food and water than you had in the woods, but it’s somehow harder to live here than anywhere else.They keep a chain linked around your neck, bolted to the ground and they whip you when you cower away from the cage they lock you in each night. The only time you’re able to move freely is when they push you into the ring – a deep pit dug into the ground, surrounded by a high fence of barbed wire and brambles. (You tried to climb it once and almost bled out. They whipped you harder than ever before after that, and didn’t feed you for two days.)

Your time in the woods left your vocal chords mostly useless for things outside of growling and screeching. The men sometimes jeer and prod at you, trying to get you to sing songs or recite verses of things you’ve never heard of and when you hiss and bark at them they laugh even harder.

The things they make you fight range from wild animals to half-broken robots and straw dummies to other people, mostly the sick or the weak at first and then heavier hitters after some time. Everything they set against you, they force you to kill. It’s hard until it’s not and sometimes you wake up crying and unable to get the sound of snapping necks or gurgling lungs out of your head. (You get punished for that, too, so eventually you force yourself to stop.)

You’re 13-years-old when they send you into the ring, the actual ring, for the first time.You know it’s different because there are people crowded around all sides of the barrier, yelling and cheering and waving trinkets and papers around.

Your first opponent is a man much larger than you. That makes him much slower than you as well and you’re not afraid. When you snap his neck, the crowd explodes and the sound scares you much more than he did. You shrink away back to your cage just to get away from too many sets of eyes and too many open mouths and too many lights.

You’re not punished that night and you’re fed very well.

Things begin to fall into a pattern and for the second time in your life, you start to forget.

–

You’re 17-years-old and undefeated. Vaguely you understand that that is a very good thing but it seems inconsequential so long as your masters are happy. They still keep you chained up, but you stopped trying to run a lifetime ago.

You’ve never lost but you’ve taken your fair share of hits. Your body is blanketed in scars and pock marks and jagged road map lines from hasty stitches and back room surgeries, marred by infection and bruises that never seem to go away. Sometimes it hurts to move, even on days when you haven’t fought at all.

Your masters always talk about you as if you are not in the room, even when they’re standing just feet outside of your cage. Most of the time it doesn’t bother you or interest you at all, but it’s different suddenly when you overhear, “He’s worth the most as he is right now, too much longer and we’ll be taking a loss.” followed by, “Sellin’ him’ll bring us more’n he can win now. Too fuckin’ old, too used up. Gonna get killed if we keep sendin’ him in. Then’ll be worth nothin’ at all.” followed by, “You’re right, you’re right. Tell Bron the deal’s on.”The sea-sick swell of worry that blossoms in your stomach only gets worse from that point.

They don’t make you fight that night, even though you know you’re supposed to (you’ve learned to tell time by the rhythm of the fights and the number of nights between them, and skipping a night throws your entire count off balance. You feel dizzy and lost and-)

“Is ‘e gonna fight ‘im? This fella, Bron?” “Whadda you care about it? If he fights him or fucks him, it ain’t none’a our business once we got the money.” “Fair ‘nough, fair ‘nough.”

They tie a bag around your head before they take you away the next morning and for some reason it reminds you of a place a million years away.

–

As it turns out, Bron’s plan was to fuck you and not to fight you and it doesn’t go over very well for him. You don’t appreciate being touched and you break his hand. He has his bodyguard attempt to beat you and you kill him. Then you kill Bron. It all happens very fast (you hold the record for fastest fatality back home – no, no, not home – where – back - ).